Today is a sad one at GARNet HQ as we are losing Ruth Bastow to pastures new (a position with ELIXIR at the Earlham Institute).

Ruth has been involved with GARNet for well over a decade, first as full time coordinator and more recently as the part-time support for Charis Cook and myself.

Over those years Ruth has established GARNet as the respected voice for UK academic plant sciences. She is rightly extremely well regarded by the few who have served on the advisory board, the many who attended the (now) biennial GARNet meeting or the thousands who have used the resources on the GARNet website.

During this time Ruth’s vision has grown broader as she has played significant roles in the establishment of both the UK Plant Science Federation and the Global Plant Council. Without her vision none of these organisations would have survived so it is important that those of us still involved respect her legacy by focusing on maintaining the strength of these organisations.

One of Ruth’s finest contributions to the UK Plant Science community was in the organisation of the International Conference for Arabidopsis Research (ICAR) in Edinburgh in 2009. Hopefully the community can again bring this excellent meeting back to the UK in the coming years…

On a personal level it has been a pleasure to be Ruth’s friend and colleague since we met as starting PhD students at the University of Warwick in 1997(!).

Last week the excellent International Conference on Arabidopsis Research (ICAR) took place in St Louis. This global meeting moves between North America, Europe and Asia on a rolling three year cycle. This years attendance was less than in recent years but for that reason it provided a great opportunity for attendees to get to grips with the excellent science in the presentations and the poster sessions without being overwhelmed by the amount of information.

The meeting included an excellent amount of interaction on social media, which included plenty of dedicated tweeters! Bethany Huot has done a great job of putting the activity from the twitterverse into these daily Storify articles. Please take a look at them.

During the after-conference come-down and return to ‘normal’ life it can be difficult to keep track of what you heard and why it was important. Therefore we have put together a file that lists the speaker affiliation and the research that they discussed during their talks. Sorry this is limited to the talks that GARNet attended…

This weeks Arabidopsis Research Roundup includes three studies that are led from Norwich Research Park and another from the University of Nottingham. In the latter case Rupert Fray leads an investigation into the scarcely researched process of N6-adenosine methylation of RNA. The next two papers involve members of the Sainsbury lab in Norwich and investigate either the RPS4-RRS1 or FERONIA-LLG1 defence signaling pathways. Finally is a study that originates from the John Innes Centre links the defence response with biotic predation and calcium signaling.

Open AccessRupert Fray (University of Nottingham) is the corresponding author on this global collaboration that investigates the poorly understood yet essential phenomenon of mRNA N6-adenosine methylation (m6A). They used a combination of experimental techniques to identify a range of proteins that are necessary for this process. These proteins include the E3 ubiquitin ligase HAKAI that, when its expression is reduced, causes a range of phenotypes, including aberrant root vascular formation. The targets of the HAKAI E3 ligase are still to be determined but the authors suspect that this type of interaction will have relevance across eukaryotic species.

Jonathan Jones (The Sainsbury Laboratory, Norwich) leads this UK-funded study that includes collaborators from Bath and Exeter and looks into the function of the RPS4-RRS1 immune signaling complex. During the course of the paper they define the sub-cellular binding relationships between plant proteins RPS4, RRS1, EDS1 along with the pathogen effector AvrRps4. Furthermore they show that these protein interactions differently interact with PAD4 or SAG101. The authors demonstrate that this immune complex is highly dynamic during effector recognition and that altered proportions of each member disrupts the defence response.

Silke Robatzek (The Sainsbury Laboratory, Norwich) is a co-author on this Chinese-led study that investigates the role of the FERONIA signaling complex in the response to pathogen PAMPs. They show that LORELEI-LIKE GPI-ANCHORED PROTEIN 1 (LLG1) is a FERONIA co-receptor and that plants deficient in llg1 are more susceptible to various pathogens even though these plants do not show general growth defects. Overall the authors show that as a coreceptor of FERONIA, LLG1 plays a central role in many PAMP-dependent signaling pathways and is a candidate for future research in this area.

Dale Sanders and GARNet committee member Saskia Hogenhout are corresponding authors on this study that includes researchers from the JIC and the University of Wisconsin. This research focused on the role of calcium as a signal during the response to biotic stress. They combined a fluorescent calcium biosensor (GCaMP3) during aphid predation experiments. They detected elevated calcium levels that coincided with aphid probing of leaf epidermal and mesophyll cell layers. They used the power of Arabidopsis genetics to determine that a number of known signaling molecules were involved in this process, allowing them to link biotic predation, the defence response and cellular calcium movement within a single signaling network.

Fascination of Plants Day: Botany Live
In 2012 the European Plant Science Organisation (EPSO) started global ‘Fascination of Plants Day’, an event that aimed to raise the profile of plant science and plant scientists around the world. Since two initial consecutive years this has now switched to a biannual event that has been fully embraced by people who work in on all aspects of plant science. Details of this can be found at http://www.plantday.org/. In the UK the events were coordinated by Dr Dario Breitel at the John Innes Centre and featured events at around 30 venues around the country.

One of these events was entitled ‘Botany Live’ and was led by Anne Osterrieder who is a lecturer in Biology and Science Communication at Oxford Brookes University as well as being the editor of the Annals of Botany blog (https://aobblog.com/). The aim of this event was to use the accessible online streaming resource Periscope to bring plant science into peoples’ homes and workplaces. The organisers requested that people live-stream a ‘short peek’ into their lives as plant scientists.

Keith Edwards discusses Wheat Transformation

Over the weekend of FoPD (May 18th-21st) 32 events signed up to provide a Botany Live video. The majority of these were from the US and UK but also featured videos from Lebanon and Argentina! These videos are being uploaded to the Botany Live website (https://botany.live/events/) so you can go back and check out the action!
Botany Live kicked off on the evening on May 17th (UK time) with Marcela Karey Tello-Ruiz who is the coordinator of the Gramene project in New York. She live- streamed a ‘Plant Superpowers’ session in which she interacted with a group of primary school students to share the joy of amazing plants! https://www.pscp.tv/w/1yoJMBLXagDxQ

Official FoPD day, May 18th, also saw the majority of Botany Live events. These were kicked off by Alison Bentley providing an introduction to the NIAB Innovation Farm facility prior to the Wheat Transformation Facility Wrap up meeting (see also page 38 in this edition of GARNish). This video also featured Keith Edwards, Ben Sibbett and Sinead Drea discussing their wheat research projects (https://www.pscp.tv/w/1nAKEBqpYolGL).

Throughout the (UK) afternoon there were a number of short videos from Kew Gardens that introduced some of the interesting plants that they have on site! A real video highlight was a very well choreographed livestream organized by Dr Jonathan Mitchley (aka Dr M) from the University of Reading in which he interacted with a group of school children, who gave their ‘plant highlights’.

Truly it was a mixed bag of events and was an excellent first attempt at using this type of media to promote plant science. Hopefully Botany Live will be repeated again with more people taking up the challenge of putting together an interesting video for the global community……and tackling the connectivity issues relies on WiFi or a good 3G signal!

The Multinational Arabidopsis Steering Committee (MASC) is responsible for supporting global Arabidopsis research. This is acheived through two mechanisms:

Firstly MASC members organise the annual International Conference on Arabidopsis Research (ICAR). This meeting often welcomes up to and over 1000 delegates to a location that switches between Asia, Europe and The Americas on a three-year cycle.

This Arabidopsis Research Roundup has five papers that includes two from the John Innes Centre and two from the University of Edinburgh. Firstly Kristen Bomblies’s group at the JIC have investigated the relationship between temperature and meiotic recombination rates. Secondly Veronica Grieneisen and Stan Maree have developed a mathematical model to characterise cell morphologies taken[…]

The first two papers in this weeks Arabidopsis Research Roundup investigate different aspects of the plants response to temperature fluctuations. Firstly Lars Ostergaard (JIC) looks at the influence of temperature in the control of fruit dehiscence whilst Phil Wigge (SLCU) investigates crosstalk between chloroplast and nuclear signaling. The third paper from Ian Henderson (University of[…]

Charles Melnyk discusses a new paper published in PNAS that describes the molecular events that occur during grafting. The paper is entitled ‘Transcriptome dynamics at Arabidopsis graft junctions reveal an intertissue recognition mechanism that activates vascular regeneration‘ http://blog.garnetcommunity.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Melynk_180301.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: iTunes | Android | RSS

This edition of the Arabidopsis Research roundup beings with a study from SLCU that provides a molecular context to the changes that occur at graft junctions. Second is a study from Edinburgh that reports on the findings of a citizen science plant phenotyping project. Third are two studies from the John Innes Centre that follow-on[…]

This weeks Arabidopsis Research Roundup begins with a study from SLCU that investigates the interaction between nitrate and cytokinin signaling in the shoot meristem. Next is research from Sheffield that studies changes to the macromolecular composition of the photosynthetic apparatus following the transition from dark to light. Third are three papers that include University of[…]

GARNet with support from the Bristol Centre for Agricultural Innovation and New Phytologist are organising a Gene Editing Workshop that will take place at the University of Bristol on March 26th-27th 2018. This workshop is designed to encourage interactions and discussion about the use of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing in plant systems. We are encouraging ECRs[…]

The cellular mechanics of auxin perception and signaling have been well studied over the past two decades. The pivotal interaction that controls this activity involves the auxin-dependent contact between the TIR1 receptor and a family of transcriptional regulators called AuxIAA proteins. This interaction has been characterised at a structural level with the auxin indole-3-acetic acid[…]

This weeks Arabidopsis Research Roundup begins with two papers from Royal Hollaway University of London that investigate the factors that control leaf development in the dark and the control of PIN1 phosphorylation. Third is a paper from Bristol that demonstrates the translation of research from Arabidopsis into coriander with regard the control of the response[…]

Enrique Lopez-Juez (Royal Holloway University of London) introduces a paper from that attempts to answer a critical question in plant science ‘Why do plants makes leaves in the dark‘? http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/early/2017/12/28/pp.17.01730.long http://blog.garnetcommunity.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Lopez_180116.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: iTunes | Android | RSS